Has any professional athlete ever made more a mess of his life than Atlanta Falcon quarterback Michael Vick?

At the ripe old age of 27, Vick had it made. After a stellar senior season at Virginia Tech, Vick was drafted in the first round of the 2001 NFL draft by the Falcons and immediately anointed as the savior of a struggling franchise, an electrifying quarterback unlike any the league had ever seen. Although one could name several quarterbacks throughout the history of the NFL who were mobile enough to scramble and occasionally break loose for decent runs, Vick was the first quarterback whose running ability actually terrified defensive coordinators around the league.

For the last 24 hours, I have felt like a character in a movie. You have seen the movie, probably dozens of times. A small-town team nobody has ever heard of gets its big chance against a nationally ranked powerhouse. The fans there look up things about the team just out of curiosity, where the town is on the map, the enrollment numbers, maybe. They cannot pronounce the name of the school.

A few years ago, I received a letter from a reader that I have never forgotten. Upset over the suicide of a former student — who I knew had long agonized over dealing with his homosexuality due to various painful journal entries he had written on his struggles — I had written a fairly angry column denouncing homophobia and challenging the widely held belief that one’s sexual orientation is a “choice.” About a week later, a letter arrived from a gentleman in his 60s, who basically laid out the long, sad story of his own lifelong struggle with being gay.

The central paradox of parenting is that by the time you have it figured out, it’s over. Now that I have written that sentence, I immediately see two flaws in it, regardless of how wise it sounds. First, parenting is never over. Well into my late 30s, my father was still giving me an “allowance” and buying my meals whenever we ate out at restaurants, and my mother still fretted over my lack of sleep. You don’t stop being a parent the day your child turns 18. Second, you never figure it out. Never. You’ll figure out Rubik’s Cube before you have the first clue about parenting. You’ll learn two languages and write a novel first. Learn to play the violin. Run the Boston Marathon. Dance with the stars.

Let me say this first. This is not really a column about restaurants. The last time I wrote a column about restaurants, I suggested that Pizza Hut bring those poor young ladies holding signs on the curb out of the blazing afternoon sun and let them work inside in air conditioning. Two days after that column appeared, we saw one of those same young ladies holding a sign that read, “Chris Cox, We Love Our Job!”

I miss all those Sundays at my grandma’s house, so many Sundays, so many years. Once upon a time, it seemed we would never run out of them. It seemed as if there would always be cars lined up like dominos in the driveway, a couple of the trucks pulled up into the yard. It seemed as if the smell of frying chicken would always waft into the living room from the kitchen, drawing the men’s attention momentarily away from the Redskins-Cowboys football game and their talk of work and weather. It seemed as if the women would always be opening doors with their elbows, their arms full of casseroles or pies or three-bean salads.

I am pretty sure I am going to get lashed for saying this, especially as an English teacher, but I do not really believe there is much that can be done to improve one’s ability to spell words. I haven’t done the research, but it has always seemed to me that good spellers are born, not made, that the ability to spell is as genetic as freckles or male pattern baldness.

I look at you. You look at me. We’re dancing sort of, but I’m not much of a dancer and neither are you. There is no practical reason why you would want or need to buy cookie dough from my six-year-old daughter, just as there was no practical reason why, just a few years ago, I bought six boxes of Girl Scout cookies from your daughter. If either of us needed or wanted the cookies, we would simply get in our cars, drive to the supermarket, and purchase them. Think of a world in which we would have the things we needed only when six-year-old girls came knocking on our doors to provide them to us. I do not believe that this is a world either of us wants to live in.

As you know, the Christmas season these days begins about 20 minutes after the last of the trick or treaters have collected their candy, and lasts until the last college bowl game is over, which used to be on New Year’s Day, but is now closer to Valentine’s Day. In other words, it goes on forever, no doubt driven more by the greed of consumerism than the true spirit of Christmas.

(Editor’s note: Smoky Mountain News columnist Chris Cox delivered this address to the graduating class at Southwestern Community College this past weekend.)

A couple of days after I was asked to deliver this address, I asked my creative writing students if they had any ideas about what I should say. One of them said, “You should say something funny. Definitely funny.” But then one of them said, pausing for effect, “What if you try to say something funny and no one laughs?”

So it’s the New Year. The ball has dropped, the parties are all over, your Kool and the Gang album has been tucked away for another year, and Dick Clark has gone back into his jar of formaldehyde. Did you make some New Year’s resolutions? I just bet you did. One great thing about Americans is how plucky we are. Every year, we make various resolutions: to lose weight, contribute more to charities, write more letters, be better neighbors, and watch less television. And every year, let’s face it, we fail miserably.

Are you ready for a change, I mean a REAL change? The candidates for president of the United States are clearly ready.

George Bernard Shaw once said, “It’s a shame that youth is wasted on the young.” If that is true, then I would also add that it is equally a shame that boredom is wasted on the bored.

The most fascinating race for President of the United States in my lifetime could have become a good bit more settled after the Super Tuesday round of primaries. Hillary Clinton, the “establishment” candidate and heavy favorite going into the primary season, might have delivered the knockout blow to upstart Barack Obama. Instead, she managed only to hold serve in the biggest states that she absolutely had to have — New York, New Jersey, and California — and emerge on Wednesday with the very slightest of leads in delegates. It was enough for the Clinton campaign to declare the night a success, which it had to do as a show of confidence.

Sparta, N.C. – I am on my way to town to get a birthday cake for my son, Jack. He will be 3 years old tomorrow, but we are celebrating tonight, so that all the family can join in the celebration while we are in town. I am thinking what every parent thinks when a child’s birthday rolls around: He cannot be 3 already. How can time possibly move so fast?

I’ll admit that I have never been much of a cat person. It’s because I am a little selfish, I guess. When I come home at the end of the day, I like to have a pet who is happy to see me. When I come home at the end of the day, my miniature dachshund goes completely mad. He’s happier to see me than a teenage girl seeing Paul McCartney in 1964. In other words, he adores me, and I like that.

That’s just not how cats roll. In fact, cats don’t roll at all. They don’t roll, and they don’t do tricks, at least not the tricks you want them to do. They do what they like, especially if they are older, as accustomed to wielding power as an old mafia don. You keep company with a cat for very long, you eventually come to realize that you are actually more his valet than he is your pet. You live to serve your cat.

Maybe it is just my history with cats. I had one aunt who had a cat that mauled me when I stepped on her tail as a toddler, and another aunt who had a Siamese cat named “Princess” (of course) who was said to eat children. My aunt brought the cat home from Winston-Salem once and told us, “I’m sorry, kids, you can’t really touch or even go near Princess. She’s temperamental.” If we even ventured into the same room with Princess, she would arch her back and hiss menacingly, then crouch like a cheetah getting ready to pounce, causing us to dive over furniture like little soldiers avoiding gunfire.

With all of this as context, you can imagine how pleased I was when I met my wife years ago and discovered that she owned a cat that she had curiously burdened with the name “Bubbie Thomas” (pronounced “Toe Moss”). I had two dogs, an enormous lab/shepherd mix and a pit bull, and now a cat was going to be introduced into this environment? How was THAT supposed to work?

“Is he temperamental?” I asked her. I figured I had learned my way around cat euphemisms the hard way.

She told me that Bubbie was a pretty laid back cat. I had never heard of that and didn’t really believe her. I will never forget the first time I saw my two-year-old daughter reach over and lift Bubbie off the ground as nonchalantly as picking up a sack of flour and then stand there proudly with her pudgy little arms locked together just under his front arms. It looked as if she were about to perform the Heimlich Maneuver on him. Poor Bubbie had the look you sometimes see in the eyes of people who have been held hostage for a long time, a look of pure resignation with just a drop of hope, a look that said, “I’d sure like to escape, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon, is it?”

I had never seen anything like this in a cat before. I would come to understand eventually that Bubbie was kind of the “anti-Princess,” a cat that would never harm a child, even if the child pulled on his tail, tweaked his ears, or dragged him around in a wagon with a heavy towel covering his entire body, save a whisker or two. “Time to take baby shopping,” my daughter would say, and Bubbie would be off on an imaginary shopping trip. He would probably be trying on jackets, necklaces, and hats soon, and these indignities he would endure as patiently as any monk.

A few years later, when my son was born, the entire cycle began again, and then a few years after that, we brought home a miniature dachshund puppy who, the minute he was first able to pry his own eyes often after having been born, perceived that everything he saw was part of his new kingdom. Though he was no bigger than a cigarette, he was an alpha dog from the start, and within just a few months he and Bubbie began waging a three-year war for control of the home.

Though my general preference for dogs is well-documented, I was heartened to see Bubbie stand his ground against “the black menace,” as we came to call our dachshund. The dog would come racing around a corner or lunge from the sofa, dive-bombing poor Bubbie, who would react surprisingly quickly, considering his advancing age and slowing reflexes. He would hiss and raise a paw like Muhammad Ali fending off a Joe Frazier jab, then throw a rapid fire series of his own jabs.

Eventually, these two worked out an inexplicable truce, and each night they would wind up sprawled out next to each other like a couple of tiny dead cowboys on the sofa while my wife and I watched television or worked on our laptops.

As Bubbie continued to age, he began having some difficulty jumping on and off furniture, and lately he had been losing some weight. We took him to the vet last Friday as a precaution, thinking they could give him a steroid or something to increase his appetite. He was 14 years old, but we figured that with some love and care, he had a few more golden years left in him.

I was on my way to a meeting when my daughter called from the vet’s office and said with a voice choked with trembling bravery, “Daddy, I have some bad news. They’re putting Bubbie to sleep.”

I wheeled around immediately and sped as fast as I could to the vet and got there literally just in time. Bubbie was laid out on the table, barely conscious. My wife, barely able to hold back deep, heaving sobs, was holding and stroking his head. I held her with one arm and petted Bubbie with the other. His eyes were open, but he was completely limp, completely at peace, ready to go.

“He has a terminal disease,” said my wife. “They said it’s just going to get worse and worse.”

When it was over, my daughter could not be consoled, and I could do absolutely nothing to help her except sit on the bed and watch her whole body shake with wave after wave of the first pure grief she had ever had to endure. Memories of Bubbie swarmed the room; we couldn’t wipe them away, couldn’t find comfort in them, not yet. I knew that day would come, but she didn’t, and I couldn’t find the words to convince her.

“Why does it have to hurt so much, Daddy?” she said.

“Because we loved him so much,” I said. What else could I say?

“I never want another pet,” she said, and then screamed, “NEVER! NEVER! NEVER!”

One day, she will. Her broken heart will heal, as broken hearts must. One day, we will be able to talk about all the times she carried Bubbie around in her little arms, her head smushed against his, smiling and holding on for dear life. But not today. Today, we just manage to navigate around that big hole in our home where Bubbie used to be, trying not to fall in.

Godspeed, Bubbie Thomas. We’ll thank you for the memories as soon as we are able. Holding you tight, never letting go.

(Chris Cox is a teacher and a writer. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Here in the South, if you are of a certain age, you have two families at least. The first is the family you’re born into. About that, you have no real say in the matter. Your second family consists of the people who, like you, grew up watching “The Andy Griffith Show.” Like you, they believe that Mayberry is a real place, even though they know it isn’t, and yet it still is, really, just as real as the actual place they grew up, perhaps more so in some important way.

If that last sentence makes sense to you, you’re probably one of us. That means you probably know all the episodes by heart, even the ones  shot in color after Don Knotts left for the bright lights of Hollywood. It means that you know the real names of the actors who played the important characters, and just about all of them were important. Andy and Barney were the main characters, of course, but any member of the family knows that Frances Bavier (Aunt Bea), Ron Howard (Opie), Howard McNear (Floyd the barber), Jim Nabors (Gomer), Hal Smith (Otis), Betty Lynn (Thelma Lou), and Aneta Corsaut (Helen Crump) were every bit as crucial to the show as Andy and Barney. These were not just one-dimensional supporting characters but fully realized, vividly fleshed out human beings with indelible personalities of their own. In any given episode, one of them might be the protagonist instead of Andy or Barney. Any one of them could easily carry the show for as many episodes as the writers wished, and each had turns at being “the star.”

Aunt Bea relishing her “kerosense cucumbers.” Opie raising his baby birds. Thelma Lou refusing to be in Barney’s “hip pocket.” Gomer trying to repay Andy for saving his life. We know and remember every episode. In a way, they have mixed in among our own childhood memories, since many of us first saw these episodes as children and have seen them countless times since. Watching reruns of the show is, for us, akin to pulling out the family photograph album and remembering when. We love getting together with other members of “the family” and reminiscing.

“Remember that time when Andy and Barney were trying to help Goober get a girl?”

Ah, yes, Goober Pyle, played by George Lindsey. Goober was introduced to the show in 1964 as Gomer’s slightly less sophisticated cousin (“Goober ain’t stupid,” said Gomer. “He’s ugly, but he ain’t stupid.”). Goober worked at Wally’s filling station and almost always sported a beanie with turned-up edges that made him look like Mayberry’s court jester, which he was, but only at times, because none of Mayberry’s characters were ever that simple, just as real people are not.

As a young fellow, I often identified with Goober, who was shy and uneasy around girls, always relying on jokes and impressions of movie stars like Cary Grant or Edward G. Robinson in an attempt to impress them, always measuring himself against more experienced, worldly competition and coming up short, always awkward, hesitant, and uncertain. In spite of this, onward he plunged into the dense thicket of romance, armed only with the dullest butterknife to try to clear a path and find his way. That’s EXACTLY how I felt as well, inept and awkward, but propelled forward by forces I could neither comprehend nor resist. Over and over I stumbled, but, like Goober, I kept flailing away.

As Barney Fife put it in his pep talk to Goober, “Andy’s got a girl, I’ve got a girl, all God’s children got a girl.”

If Goober could find a girl, maybe I could, too. If Goober could keep trying, why shouldn’t I?

There are a lot of great Goober moments in the show, but my favorite may be an episode late in the series in which Goober forgets his razor on a camping trip, comes back with a scruffy beard, and then becomes convinced that he has become an intellectual because Andy, Floyd, and Aunt Bea tell him he looks “different,” and Goober longs more than anything to be different, to be as wise, successful, and self-assured as anyone else. Heavily influenced as he always is by the power of suggestion, Goober becomes overconfident to the point of being unbearable, pontificating on any and every subject to any and every person until Andy finally explodes (he was more irritable in the colored episodes, I submit) and tells him to shut up. Goober is chastened, fairly limping out of the barbershop in humiliation. But then we see him again at the weekly meeting of the town’s history club, offering a tentative and mercifully brief remark on the industrial revolution, followed by a self-effacing comment and that trademark grin.

Once again, Goober had gathered his pride, courage, and determination, and plunged ahead into the wilderness of human interaction.

Just a few short days ago, George “Goober” Lindsey died after a brief illness at the age of 83. He joins Don Knotts, Hal Smith, Frances Bavier, Howard McNear, Aneta Corsaut, and Jack Dodson, among others, who have gone on to that Mayberry that, in a way, exists in everyone who is part of this particular family, the Mayberry that is permanent and unchanging, the Mayberry where there is always time to make homemade ice cream on the porch on Sunday after church, where you can catch up on the local gossip in Floyd’s Barber Shop, and where on a warm summer night, you can hear Andy strumming his guitar all the way to the end of Maple Street.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. He can be reached This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

In the 1960s and 70s, everybody smoked, everybody but my mother, who didn’t smoke, drink, or do anything that Ann Landers wouldn’t have approved of. She still doesn’t, although I seem to recall that she once drank a pina colada on a cruise, long after the children were grown, of course. No, she didn’t smoke, which made her all the more remarkable since almost everyone else did. Finding a young person who didn’t smoke then would be like finding a young person now who doesn’t have a tattoo, a rare and wondrous creature.

My family photograph albums are filled with old photographs of relatives engaged in all sorts of activities, all performed with the ubiquitous cigarette dangling from lips, or attached like another finger to their right hands. My uncle, hovering over the grill, flipping hamburgers, smoking a cigarette. My grandmother, sitting on the front porch, breaking beans, smoking a cigarette. My father, standing in the front yard with a garden hose, spraying something or someone, smoking a cigarette.

I flirted with smoking off and on from the time I was 13 to the night I quit for good, in a bar called — and I am not making this up — Tobacco Road on Christmas Eve of 1984. I was sitting at a table with my best friend, Stewart, nursing a Michelob and a broken heart, watching the smoke drift into shreds beneath the stage lights where Nantucket had just finished their third encore and called it a night.

It was somewhere between one and two in the morning, and most of what was left of the crowd had already dispersed and vanished into the night. We were pondering a move on a table of four girls and two guys — Stewart had been asked to dance by one of the girls four or five times over the course of the evening, and now they were playing the “I see you, and I know you see me” game of staring that inevitably led to dancing, kissing, and leaving, one car following the other who knew where?

But my heart wasn’t really in it, and neither was his, I could tell. I killed my beer and stubbed out my cigarette just a bit dramatically. I was upset that a girl I liked had decided to go back to an old boyfriend. I was also upset that I was upset about it.

“That’s it for me,” I said, twisting the butt of the cigarette into the tray longer than necessary for an exclamation point. “That right there was my last cigarette.”

I can’t be absolutely sure, as I was tilting a little toward drunk just then, but I think I felt that quitting smoking was symbolic, since the girl was a smoker. I was giving cigarettes up. I was giving her up. Rather, I was giving the idea of her up. Poof. Up in smoke. It made sense to me at the time.

I haven’t smoked since. Most of those relatives from the photographs have also quit or passed away, many of them from smoking-related causes — heart attacks, cancer, diabetes. Stewart quit, too, just a year or two ago. He promptly gained 30 pounds, got disgusted with himself, and then turned to bike-riding to shed the weight. Now he competes in triathlons.

Yes, these are different days, different ways. There aren’t many places where a person can smoke inside, or even on the premises of many places. Many campuses are tobacco free. Smokers have become outcasts, even pariahs. It is difficult to comprehend how much smoking was just part of the culture then, not just something people did but part of who they were. Where I came from, you either farmed tobacco or knew people who did. My high school had a smoking area, and not just for the teachers. A lot of the guys who didn’t smoke chewed tobacco, usually Red Man. It was easy to buy cigarettes or chewing tobacco regardless of your age. After all, you were just supporting the local economy.

These days, most of the tobacco farms are gone from that area, many replaced by acres and acres of Christmas trees. I don’t know what percentage of people in the county are smokers, but it is a tiny fraction of what it once was, and that is a good thing. It is also a good thing that most people now wear seat belts, which they didn’t used to do, and avoid laying out in the sun all day on the weekends getting a tan, which they did use to do.

You do not see many pick-ups out on the highway with a bed full of children jostling around, which was pretty common back then. You don’t see many people on bicycles without a helmet. I cannot recall ever seeing a person on a bicycle wearing a helmet in those days.

By almost any sort of reckoning, we are smarter, safer, and healthier now than we once were. Would it sound crazy, then, if I admit that I kind of miss the general recklessness of those times? Have we somehow become too cautious, too buckled up, too protected, too insulated from the big, bad world?

Maybe it’s just the people in those pictures that I really miss, breaking beans until after dark, blowing smoke rings at the moon.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

When the legendary — and former — Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno died on Sunday morning, the first thought I had was of Oedipus the King. Like Paterno, Oedipus was much beloved by his subjects and, like Paterno, his moral blindness resulted in tragedy. There are those who say that Paterno, who was diagnosed with lung cancer not long after the news of the Jerry Sandusky scandal broke and an empire 46 years in the making began to crumble, died of a broken heart. I don’t doubt that it hastened his death.

Perhaps it seems the height of hyperbole to cast Paterno’s fall from grace as worthy of Greek tragedy, but consider that Paterno was not only an icon at Penn State but a genuine legend in American sports. If there were a Mount Rushmore for college football coaches, Paterno’s face would not only have been on it — before the fall — it would have been the most prominent.

It was not only that Paterno had been at Penn State for 46 years and built a great football program that had endured over that span of time. It was that he was a symbol not just for succeeding, but for doing it the right way. If you had been asked to describe Paterno, you would have used words such as “integrity,” “honor,” and “loyalty” in a summary of his career and influence on the game. In a culture in which scandals, usually related to a “win at all cost” mentality, are all too common, Joe Paterno was the gold standard, the example you could point to if you wanted to demonstrate that there were still good guys out there whose character was beyond reproach.

The most bitterly ironic part of his fall from grace is that Paterno was the kind of coach you would want if you had a son who was planning to play college football. You would have trusted Paterno with your own child, and indeed, there are hundreds of players and former players who have stepped up to defend his reputation in the wake of the charges of serial child abuse against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky and allegations of a cover-up on the part of Paterno, the former president of the university, and several others. As scandals in American sports history are weighed and debated, this will go down as one of the very biggest ever.

Very likely, you already know the basic framework of the story. When Paterno was told that Sandusky had sexually assaulted a boy in the shower on campus back in 2002, Paterno “turned the information over” to someone else internally at Penn State. Sandusky was ultimately not charged, and Paterno did not follow up. This was nearly 10 years ago. Last fall, Sandusky was charged with 52 counts of child molestation, for which he will soon stand trial. On Nov. 9, not long after those charges had been made public, Paterno announced his retirement, but he was fired along with school president Graham Spanier less than 12 hours later by the Penn State board of trustees, who had gone into full-scale damage control as the scandal dominated the national news every day and night.

It has been sad watching Paterno scramble to salvage what remains of his reputation at the same time that he was literally fighting for his life from lung cancer. Less than two weeks ago, Paterno spoke on his action — and non-action — to the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins: “I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was. So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”

To say that this explanation is inadequate, or even pathetic, is not just an understatement, but a mockery of common sense and basic human decency. Paterno was not just some guy at Penn State who had to follow procedure and observe the chain of command. He was the king. Had he chosen to do so, he could have pursued these charges vigorously, relentlessly, not only for the sake of the 10-year-old boy who was allegedly raped by Sandusky on that particular occasion, but for the sake of all those future victims who might have been spared had Paterno acted with honor and integrity when it mattered most.

Instead, he passed the buck. The very best that can be said is that he buried his head in the sand and rationalized that he had done what was expected of him. It is unlikely that history will be so kind in its verdict.

For all the good he did for so many young men, his epic failure to do more than the bare minimum, to do everything in his considerable power to protect young boys from a predator, Paterno’s final legacy is not just tainted by tragedy, but defined by it.

In the end, like Oedipus, he simply could not bear to look upon the truth. What a crying shame.

Chris Cox is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

On Christmas Eve, my dad would always bring home a huge box of navel oranges and bags of pecans, walnuts, and almonds, all still in their shells. These would be arranged, though not artfully, on the fireplace mantel underneath our stockings.

We knew that these gifts did not come from Santa Claus — they came from Florida, where Dad had just been in his 18-wheeler. He was not what anyone would call a healthy eater, but he did love those navel oranges. He’d peel them with his fingers, and then tear off sections for us to share. I liked peeling back the thin layer of skin on my section and then pretending to be a dinosaur devouring hundreds of the exposed, tiny orange trees with one enormous bite. Christmas Eve.

We’d sit around the tree, poking at the presents — the ones from our parents or distant relatives — lifting them to gauge the heft, or giving them a gentle shake to see if anything moved inside, and how it moved, and what sounds issued if it did move. Since these were “parent” gifts, we knew that the contents would be something responsible, but dull, like tube socks or a flannel shirt, but since Santa would not be arriving for several more excruciating hours, and these presents DID bear our names and MIGHT be something at least a little more exciting than usual — maybe a Dallas Cowboys toboggan or a box of cashew turtles — we couldn’t help fussing over them obsessively while mean old Ben Weaver kept trying to get himself arrested in the Christmas episode of “The Andy Griffith Show,” which we watched every year on Christmas Eve.

Ben Weaver. The Grinch. Ebenezer Scrooge. If Christmas possessed the magic to turn those hardened hearts, it was no less magical to us because it also had the power to bring our dad home to spend the evening with us, which was a rare and wondrous thing. He spent most of his time out on the truck, driving all over the country, and when he was home, he managed to find, orchestrate, or simply will a card game into existence, such was his love of gambling, or more precisely, his love of playing cards. Gambling was just his way of making the games more meaningful.

In any case, I didn’t begrudge it. I have always enjoyed, even admired, being around people who are in their element, doing what they love, and my dad was in his element playing cards. When we got a little older — old enough to drive — we knew we could find him at the golf course or the pool room or Southside Restaurant or Grady’s General Store playing gin for 10 or 20 or 50 dollars a hand, depending upon the daring, foolishness, and/or relative wealth of his opponent at any given time. He almost never lost, and when he did, he would usually win the next four or five hands in a row. He understood the game from the inside, somehow. If “Good Will Hunting” had been about cards, my dad would have been played by Matt Damon.

We’d find him, and then watch him play for 20 or 30 minutes. It was like watching a detective sweat out a confession, as he toyed with his opponent, joking one minute, grimacing the next, arching an eyebrow, the meaning of which was impossible to decode. The other guy would try to read something in his face — a huge mistake, a fatal mistake, as he transformed suddenly from a detective to a vampire, glamouring the poor fool into playing out another losing hand, and then handing us the proceeds to pay for gas, arcade games, fast food, or whatever escapades might await us on a Friday night in Sparta.

How many of our weekends, automobiles, or college classes were funded over the years from gambling is impossible to say, but suffice to say it was a lot. My sister once got a bedroom suite because a guy couldn’t pay. I once got my house painted.

Last week, my wife bought home a huge bag of navel oranges on the eleventh anniversary of my father’s death. It was just a coincidence, but this convergence brought him back with a force I haven’t felt for awhile, though he is, as he always has been, dead or alive, at the edge of my thoughts and dreams, barely out of reach, but still always there somehow, happy and in his element.

If you are lucky enough to have your dad at home on Christmas Eve, give him a big hug and savor him. If you are a dad, get home as much as you can all through the year. Find your kids in their element, and savor them. They’re growing up quick — you can bet on that.

Merry Christmas, Dad. I hope the navel oranges in heaven are as good as the ones from Florida.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who livesi n Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

During the winter, we met every Tuesday night in the conference room of the First Methodist Church, and on the colder nights of December and January, the smell of the kerosene heater stung our nostrils and coated the inside of our skulls like thick black paint. We milled around in our starchy brown uniforms and bright red neckerchiefs like little soldiers waiting to be deployed while we were actually waiting for the scoutmaster to appear and give us the scout signal, which meant that we were to fall into ranks in our respective patrols.

I was in the Screaming Eagles, which I thought was an awesome — we used the word  “awesome” a lot — patrol to be in, not only because of the obvious patriotic symbolism, but because the very idea of an actual screaming eagle seemed dangerous and thrilling. We were predatory and furious, soaring one minute, swooping down to snatch a goose from a pond the next minute. We were feared, but also celebrated and honored. And we had a cool patrol leader named Phil, who was laid back, but also knew his way around poison ivy and hatchets.

Once in a while, we would go camping, even in the winter, to prove our mettle and test the skills we had developed earning various merit badges, which adorned our sashes and made us stick out our narrow chests just that little bit extra as we marched down Main Street in the Christmas Parade every year.

I will confess that I was never the biggest fan of camping out in the winter to prove our mettle, regardless of the fact that my uncle’s goosedown sleeping bag — which I had inherited and which he had used during his days as a scout — had been tested to something like 20 below zero. On one of our excursions, the temperature actually did get down to 12 degrees. People were bringing their pets inside, and here we were stomping through the hard-frozen woods at dusk looking for the least crunchy patch of terrain to pitch our sad little pup tents and attempt a campfire.

It was so cold, that we tried doing everything with our gloves still on. Do you know how hard it is to pitch a tent, or operate an oil lamp, or cook up a little dinner on your Coleman stove with your gloves still on? We took them off, but within a minute or two our fingers were so numb that the net effect on our manual dexterity was the same, so we mostly kept them on and fumbled through, finally getting a fire big enough to thaw out our toes, which felt shrunken and remote in our boots. We would move our faces close enough to the crackling fire to get a little feeling and color back in them, and then quickly have to back off so that the acrid smoke did not choke us out.

We ate our beanie weanies and crackers, sandwiches, hot dogs, canned beef stew, and s’mores, and then drank hot chocolate and told ghost stories until we couldn’t stand it anymore. Even the stars seemed to shiver, and the trees groaned against a bitter wind.

“Good night, ladies,” said Phil, disappearing into his tent and then zipping it from the inside.

When I got home the next morning around 10 a.m., I took the hottest bath of my life, which lasted approximately four hours. I got so hot that I was forced to eat an entire box of Breyers French Vanilla Ice Cream when I got out, which made me so cold that I had to take another hot bath. I didn’t care. I was out of the woods, literally and figuratively. I had survived a camping trip in 12 degree weather.

I hadn’t slept more than a miserable hour or two. The rest of the night, I listened to the wind howl and batter our tents. I kept trying to find a place to put my face inside the sleeping bag where I could still breathe. When my face was not submerged completely, I felt like Mr. Potato Head, with ears and a nose that were so frozen that they felt detachable, as if they might actually fall off my head at any minute and be lost in the annihilating darkness, against which my wimpy little flashlight registered barely a protest.

I could still feel my face continuing to thaw out like a package of hamburger well up into the next day. I might go camping again someday, but never in the winter, not for any merit badge, not for anything or anyone.

And now, 35 years later, my son is trying out the scouts. His troop meets in the Methodist Church every Monday night, where the boys mill around in their starchy uniforms like little soldiers waiting to be deployed …. uh oh.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

We stood looking at the dinosaur for quite awhile. As parents of children ages 7 and 3, we are more than a little familiar with dinosaurs. In fact, our home has become somewhat of a haven for dinosaurs, an impressive assortment of velociraptors, pterodactyls, T Rex’s — we got ‘em all, even a battle-scarred triceratops that my son sometimes sneaks into bed at night. If the dinosaurs are all freed from toy basket confinement at once, his living quarters more nearly resembles Jurassic Park than a bedroom.

Still, the creature before us now is something else entirely. Standing two and half feet tall, “Spike” is able not only to walk — stampede is a better word, I suppose — he is also able to rise on two legs, throw back his massive head, and bellow full-throated roars skyward, shaking his head with rage, as if he knows his kind will soon be extinct and available only as action figures in a box store near you.

I picture him in my son’s bedroom, the other dinosaurs cowering beneath the bed, or trying to blend in with the stuffed animals. I know that my wife is about to speak, and I know what she is going to say, so when she says it, I’m ready.

“There’s just no way. We don’t have room for that. That dinosaur would have to have his OWN room. You cannot be serious.”

“Well, I’m not getting it for him. Santa Claus is. He said he wanted a big green dinosaur, and this is a big green dinosaur. Just look at him. There is no way we can leave him here.”

And I have the trump card, which she knows I am going to play, so I go ahead and play it.

“And you KNOW he is going to just love Spike. Can you imagine his face on Christmas morning?”

She can, and that is the end of that. Within minutes, we are stuffing Spike into the back of the van. I couldn’t shake the vague notion that my wife thought I might actually want Spike more than my son would, that he would be just fine with a big green dinosaur half Spike’s size, which would, in fact, still qualify as big, especially compared to his fellows back in Jack’s bedroom.

No way, I told myself. It’s about the kids. I’m an adult now, and have put childish things away. Then, the night after Christmas, we went over to my brother’s house for dinner. He has three boys in the same age range as our kids, and among other gifts, they had received a Nintendo Wii game. We spent probably an hour or two bowling, boxing, playing tennis and baseball, even golf. The kids kept wanting to horn in, but we told them they would get a turn soon.

“Now this is what you’ve really got to see,” my brother said, pulling out a game called “Rock Band.” This game includes a guitar, a drum kit, and a microphone, and the idea is that you and your friends play along to great rock and roll songs, and the more accurately you play along, the higher your score. If you fail to keep up adequately, you get “booted” out of the band.

Within seconds, I had the guitar strapped on, while my brother, who briefly fronted a band called Eastern Thunder back when mullets were considered hip and we were both capable of growing them, took the microphone. Our brother-in-law, a truck driver who was once a mechanic in the military, manned the drums. Quite possibly the most unlikely band ever assembled, we nonetheless stumbled through the tutorial before I announced us “ready for a gig,” and my brother promptly cued up “Roxanne,” by The Police.

I would like to report that we were naturals, that our wives were drawn in from the dining room to gasp in amazement at us — which they did, in fact, though not for the reasons we might have preferred. I made it half way through the song before getting booted, but my bandmates made it all the way through.

“Totally awesome!” I exclaimed when the song was over. I had become Jeff Spicoli from “Fast Times At Ridgemont High.”

We crapped out on Bon Jovi, which is just as well, but we got through a Clash song cleanly enough to get a few approving nods from the audience.

“Hey, that was pretty good,” said my mom. My mom. Rock on!

Then I got a wild hair.

“Hey, I wanna sing,” I said. “Let’s do ‘Roxanne’ again.”

So with my brother now on guitar, we got completely through “Roxanne,” and then did a Nirvana song for an encore, getting through that one as well. I looked at my individual score for singing, which was 97 out of 100. It was without question the most gratifying moment of my entire life.

OK, it was not THE most gratifying moment of my entire life. But it’s up there somewhere. I cannot recall being more pleased by any score I ever made in graduate school. Then again, I didn’t grow up dreaming of writing an ace paper on Edmund Spenser, but I did play air guitar to “Don’t Fear The Reaper” about 10,000 times in front of my bedroom mirror, dreaming of thousands of screaming fans just beyond the mirror there.

“That was really good, honey,” my wife said. My first groupie!

“But you can’t have one, OK?”

It’s just as well, really. By the time I get good enough to make it through a Ramones song, my kids will be old enough to be embarrassed by this spectacle, which would kind of burst my rock and roll bubble, if you feel me. It’s about them, after all, as I keep reminding my wife.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

You are 12 years old and it’s December and a school day. The days are shorter now, meaning it is still dark when the alarm clock blasts you out of your dreams like a cannonball fired at dawn in a war you don’t understand and didn’t choose. But you are not a cannonball. You’re a soldier, and this is reveille. Your mother is a drill sergeant, barking orders at you every morning before you are awake enough to understand them. Find your shoes, you always lose them! Brush your hair, it looks like a rat’s nest! Be careful with your milk, you usually spill it!

But not today. Where is she? You have managed to find the right knob on the alarm clock and the house is quiet again. In fact, the house is TOO quiet, no scraping of a spatula in a frying pan, no whistling of a coffee pot, no sprinkling of a shower head against a protesting occupant. Nothing but perfect stillness, utter calm, the kind of quiet that can only be accomplished by one thing — the accumulation of snow, enough to coat everything, enough to mute the earth. No cars passing by. No busses. Not even a dog barking. It’s as if the snow has enveloped every sound as well as every surface.

There is no joy purer than this recognition. It is a school day, and it has been snowing heavily while you slept, oblivious to the wonderful gift nature has prepared for you this morning. You can actually feel this before you see it, if you are properly attuned, as all kids soon become, to the ways and means of inclement weather. It is an epiphany that crystallizes slowly, deliciously, as you watch the bright red numbers on your clock change from 7:05 to 7:06. Once you have fully grasped the significance of this morning’s silence, you rush to the window and rip the curtains apart to survey the grandness of it all. And there it is, waiting just for you. Snow, two or three inches of it, maybe even more, covering everything — the cars, the mailbox, the neighbors’ rooftops, and, yes, the roads, as yet unbesmirched by even one set of tracks.

You look at this, and you press your face to the window to feel the cold glass against your nose and cheeks. You need something real, something tactile, to ground you a little. You breathe against the glass until it fogs over, then draw your initials in it. Now you’re feeling whimsical. Since there will be no school — you want to hear the “official announcement” of course, since that is part of the joy, sort of the whipped cream on the banana split of your good fortune — the whole day has been presented to you as a canvas. You can draw anything on it you wish. Potential activities crowd toward the top of your brain like fish in an aquarium seeking food.

You’ll build a snowman, a big one. You’ll build a snow fort, and assemble an arsenal of snowballs into the shape of a pyramid. You’ll develop some clever ruse to coax your sister and mom out of the house, then cream them until they both beg for mercy or run for cover. You’ll thaw out your wet, numb fingers by the fire in the fireplace, while you wait for the chicken soup to get hot on the stove. You’ll convince your mother to make you a side dish of tater tots since you are so hungry from this morning’s ambush. You’ll have a big glass of hot chocolate. You’ll watch a movie on television, or cartoons. With great stealth and cunning, you will extract your mom’s scissors from the kitchen drawer and carve amazing works of art from the morning paper, which you know will charm your father 10 percent more than it will vex him. “And this one is YOU, daddy!” That should do it.

You’ll play games with your sister, or you’ll antagonize her, which is the greatest game of all. You’ll stalk the cat through all the rooms of the house, fashioning a whip from a winter scarf and pretending to snap it in her direction like a cowboy on a horse. You will find this game more amusing than the cat finds it.

But right now is the greatest moment of all, when it is all still in front of you, and everyone else, including the sergeant, is still snuggled up in bed, and you can simply savor it. You go and turn on the radio and wait for the announcement. If you’re lucky, when you grow up, you’ll remember what days like this feel like for your kids and be a good sport when it is your turn to be ambushed.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

For most people, Lorenzo Charles, who died last week in a bus accident at the age of 47, is little more than a footnote in sports history. If you are under the age of 35 or do not follow sports, you have probably never even heard of him. In some ways, Charles is the very definition of the old cliché “in the right place at the right time.” In the spring of 1983, it was Lorenzo Charles who caught a last second desperation shot by Wolfpack guard Dereck Whittenburg and stuffed it into the basket as time expired to give N.C. State the NCAA National Championship over the prohibitively favored Houston Cougars, a victory that is still regarded by most experts as one of the greatest upsets in sports history.

The night Lorenzo Charles capped the most improbable run ever by a college basketball team with his last second heroics, I was in the basement of Owen Dorm on the N.C. State campus, surrounded by friends I had made during the previous two years when I was still a student at State. I had dropped out of school and drifted off, but not so far that I could not easily swim back for something this big. After all, these same friends and I had, during my freshman year, formed something called the HOZE Squad, which began as a way to get in on the 10-cent draft beer nights at a bar called Edwards Grocery (a promotion aimed at fraternities, but we found a loophole by ordering shirts with Greek letters. What could they say?).

There were about eight of us on the second floor of Owen Dorm, and we were all rabid sports fans, willing to camp out all night to get the best possible seats for football and basketball games. We wore our HOZE shirts on 10-cent draft night at Edwards Grocery, and we wore them to football and basketball games.

One sunny Saturday, one of us went to Radio Shack and saw a plastic fireman’s hat with a siren on top. Now the HOZE Squad had shirts and matching firemen’s helmets to wear to the games. Since we always sat in the first few rows of each game and were fairly raucous and creative in finding new ways to taunt and distract the opposing team, we soon began getting a lot of attention. The crowds at Reynolds Coliseum soon began taking cues more from us than the Wolfpack cheerleaders, so they eventually invited us to join forces with them to pump up the crowd.

Lorenzo Charles was still in high school that year, but it was Coach Jimmy Valvano’s first year at State, while Sidney Lowe, Dereck Whittenburg, and Thurl Bailey, who would form the nucleus for the 83 championship team, were all just sophomores. Led by Art Jones and Kenny Matthews, the team had a so-so year, finishing 14-13, but the next year, the team went 22-10 and made the NCAA tournament, losing in the first round.

Even though I was gone by the time the 1982-1983 season began, there were high hopes for the team going into the season, although the Virginia Cavaliers had this fellow named Ralph Sampson and the UNC Tar Heels had this other fellow named Michael Jordan. Bailey and Lowe were marginal prospects to play in the NBA, but neither had great star potential, and when Whittenburg went down during the regular season with a bad ankle, the season was in jeopardy. In fact, by the time Whittenburg returned, the team was pretty well mired in the lower middle of the conference standings and literally had to win the ACC Tournament to squeak into the field for the NCAA tournament.

Of course, the Wolfpack DID win the ACC tournament — they won three games by a grand total of 11 points, including wins over Jordan’s Tarheels and Sampson’s Cavaliers — and did earn a bid to the “big dance,” where they were slotted as a sixth seed in the West regional. The Pack was almost bounced out of the tournament in the very first game, as they were down by six points with less than a minute to go in a game against Pepperdine, but Pepperdine missed some key free throws and Cozell McQueen made a shot to put the game into a second overtime, ultimately resulting in a narrow escape for NC State in the first round.

There was even more danger the next round, when the Pack fell behind the favored Runnin’ Rebels of UNLV, this time by 12 points with about 12 minutes to play, but once again State rallied and won 71-70 on a shot by Thurl Bailey with four seconds left in the game.

The “Cardiac Pack,” as someone dubbed them, advanced to the Sweet Sixteen, where they had their one and only “ordinary” win, a 19-point win over Utah, which resulted in a rematch in the western regional final with the University of Virginia, ranked sixth in the nation and looking for revenge after the Wolfpack win in the ACC Tournament. Once again, State eked out a one-point win, 63-62, when Charles made two free throws with just seconds remaining in the game.

There is no way to overemphasize what a shock and delight it was to see N.C. State in the Final Four that year. Few, if any, fans expected anything more from that team at that time, especially with Houston and Louisville also in the Final Four. Luckily, those teams had to play each other in the semifinals, while State had Georgia in the other semifinal game. State did get by Georgia, while Houston, led by future NBA Hall of Fame players Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, looked every bit as dominant and scary as a college team featuring two future NBA Hall of Famers could possibly look in beating Louisville.

It has been nearly 30 years, and I still believe that if those two teams had played 10 more games after the championship game, Houston would have won all 10, most by double digits. But Valvano’s approach throughout the tournament had been to find a way to stay in the game, force other teams to make their free throws, and find a way to survive if they didn’t.

The only conceivable way State could hope to stay in the game was to control the tempo and get off to a good start, which they did by jumping out to a 32-25 halftime.

In the basement of Owen, we were about to come utterly unhinged. We were oh so close to winning it all, but we also knew that Houston could easily put up 50 or 60 points a half and win going away, as it had been expected to do.

Sure enough, the Cougars did rally and take a seven-point lead, but then the Wolfpack started to foul, a strategy that had served them well in getting to this point, and sure enough, the Cougars began missing their free throws. State eventually clawed to a 52-52 tie and had a chance to win the game in regulation, but the play Valvano had called broke down and all Dereck Whittenburg could do with time running out is fling up a wild shot from well beyond the top of the key.

That is when Lorenzo Charles changed our lives forever. When he stuffed the ball into the game and the buzzer sounded and Jim Valvano ran around the court looking for someone to hug, there was a frenzy of pure joy unlike anything that I have ever seen or felt. In the basement of Owen Dorm, everyone hugged everyone else. There were a lot of tears. People streamed out of the dorms and swarmed the campus, moving as one giant organism toward Hillsborough Street, where the party went on for hours and hours.

It was fitting that Lorenzo Charles had made the shot, and not Thurl Bailey or Sidney Lowe, because of how unlikely it all was. For the people who were there, Charles and the Wolfpack gave us an experience that we will never forget, a party to remember for the rest of our lives. For the HOZE Squad, eight guys who obsessed over the team as it developed over the course of three years into a national champion, Lorenzo Charles gave us something even more. He gave us a moment that any of us would name among the greatest of our entire lives, up there on the list where things like “birth of son” and “wedding” are listed, a notch below, perhaps, but JUST a notch.

On April 4, 1983, Lorenzo Charles taught us that literally anything can happen if you never give up. It sounds like some trite nonsense you would say to your child, perhaps half believing what you are saying, even as you say it. Except that we really do believe it. We believe it, because we saw it. We were there.

That’s why Charles’ death last week hit us hard. Oh, there were no more than a few Facebook posts to mark his passing among us, but there was a feeling in those posts that we all shared and all recognized. Lorenzo is gone too soon, but the spring of 1983 will burn brightly forever in our hearts. For us, he is no footnote; he’s an entire chapter, one we’ve dog-eared, highlighted, and committed to memory, a part of our very DNA.

May you rest in peace, Lorenzo Charles. The HOZE Squad says, “Thanks.”

(Chris Cox lives in Haywood County. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

(Atlanta, GA) — We don’t get out much. Unless “getting out” means running out to Taco Bell because the fish we were going to cook has gone bad and there’s nothing left to eat in the house except half of bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and an 8-ounce can of water chestnuts. Unless “getting out” means going to Taco Bell one night and the grocery store the next, we really don’t get out much.

We get out so little, in fact, that about a month ago, I decided that we had to do something about it, something pretty grand, at least by our standards. We would have to rearrange our hectic work schedules, carve out a 48-hour swath in one of our endlessly booked weeks, and go somewhere to do something. We had been promising the kids that we would take them to the aquarium in Atlanta for, oh, three or four years, and with my son, Jack, now heavily into the new baseball season — his team this year is the Braves — I thought we could work a little Major League baseball game into our trip.

The next thing you know, I was on eBay buying tickets for killer seats down the third base line for a day game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Turner Field, while Tammy was working on a package deal for tickets to the aquarium and a nearby hotel in downtown Atlanta. Within an hour, we had tickets to the game, tickets to the aquarium, and reservations at the hotel for the following weekend.

We left fairly early on Saturday morning to make sure we made it in time for the first pitch a little after 1 pm. Tammy and Kayden were going to drop us off near the gate on Henry Aaron Drive, and then go to the mall for manicures, white chocolate, and other mallstuffs. In particular, Kayden was keen on going to the American Girl doll store to look at American Girl dolls, and Tammy was keen on going anyplace where she would not have to watch baseball being played for three hours.

We made it nearly an entire hour early, time enough for Jack and me to eat a couple of $8 hotdogs and watch a little batting practice from the outfield bleachers before heading down to our fairly remarkable seats about 20 feet behind the Cardinals dugout. Jack was decked out in his Braves jersey and cap, and we settled in for a pretty exciting pitcher’s duel. Two older guys next to us had just returned from Afghanistan, and one of them, a youngish grandfatherly type probably in his late 50s, befriended Jack by feeding him peanuts and teasing him about not catching foul balls that landed nowhere near us.

“You should have got THAT one,” he said, as a ball off Matt Holiday’s bat landed three sections over and about 20 rows behind us. “You gotta reach higher if you want to go home with a ball.”

The Braves took an early lead, but the bullpen squandered it as the Cards broke through for two runs in the top of the eighth to win the game 3-2. Jack didn’t care that much. He got to see “the big guys,” and as the crowd began to clear out, he made his way down toward the Cardinal dugout looking for bottle caps, loose change, or any other exotic souvenirs of his first big league ballgame

“Hey, little buddy,” I heard a woman’s voice call out. She was sitting directly behind the dugout with four or five other elderly fans, possibly connected with the team in some way, from the looks of it. “Come here. I’ve got something for you.”

Jack walked over and she promptly handed him a baseball, one that had actually been used in the game and tossed up to her as the teams changed sides between innings. Jack accepted the ball as if an astronaut were handing him a moonrock. We thanked the nice woman profusely, and finally made our way outside to take pictures of Jack standing with the statue of Hank Aaron in front of the stadium.

The cell phone rang. I told Jack before I answered the phone that his mother and sister were lost.

“We’re completely lost,” said Tammy. “I’m pulling off to figure out where we are, and then we’ll be there soon, OK?”

With a bit of time to kill, Jack and I wandered around Turner Field until we saw a small group of people clustered at the back, evidently waiting for the players to appear and sign their pennants, programs, and such. We just missed catcher Brian McCann, but when starting shortstop Alex Gonzalez came out, I grabbed Jack and hoisted him up among the throng, and in just a few minutes, his ball was autographed.

“I guess we’re lucky your mom got lost,” I said. “But I wouldn’t say that in the car, if I were you.”

Tammy and Kayden had as much fun at the mall as we did at the game, and the aquarium was an even bigger hit the next day. We got home pretty late on Sunday, exhausted, nearly broke, and pretty far behind on our work. It would take us days and a series of late nights to catch up, and we knew it. By the time we crawled into bed, we could barely form a coherent sentence.

“We need to get out more often,” Tammy mumbled, before nodding off.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

For nearly a year, my 3-year-old son Jack has been obsessed with heavy machinery. We rent films from the library with footage of backhoes, excavators, and bulldozers pushing around heaping mounds of debris, which Jack sits and watches with absolute focus as long as we will allow it. Whenever we are going someplace in the car, Jack erupts every time he sees a crane, a steamroller, or anything gigantic, mobile, and yellow that can lift or, even better, crush, things.

I don’t worry about it much. Crushing stuff is cool — I get that. I figure it is just a phase he is going through and that he will leave it all behind soon enough. For boys, life is just a series of meaningless obsessions until they’re old enough to notice and then obsess over girls, which crushes all their other obsessions like a giant monster truck rolling over a bunch of Volkswagens.

I guess I should have foreseen what would happen the first time Jack saw a monster truck. Before I really knew what was happening, he began obsessing about something called a “Monster Truck Jam.” I soon discovered that commercials for an upcoming monster truck extravaganza had been playing pretty much nonstop on television for the past few weeks. Every time “SpongeBob SquarePants” paused for a commercial break, there were “Grave Digger” and “Monster Mutt” rolling and rumbling over rows of crumpled cars.

“Daddy, I like Grave Digger! Please take me that monster truck show! Please daddy please!”

Soon, I found myself on the Internet looking at seating charts and ordering tickets, great tickets actually, on the lower level. My 7-year-old daughter, Kayden, decided she wanted in on the action, so I bought us three tickets and on Saturday, we drove down to the BiLo Center in Greenville to get a look at these monstrosities in action. The kids were so excited they could hardly stand it. We made up monster truck songs on the way down, and talked about all the great things we expected to see these monsters do.

We were pretty hungry when we got there, and thanks to a slightly late start and slow traffic, we had to settle for getting some food at the arena, which, of course, was a big mistake. I shelled out 25 bucks for two fossilized hot dogs, one rubbery hamburger, one order of charred fries in a cup, and one large soda in a cup that could have served as a swimming pool for a small otter. I had to carry all of this on a flimsy gray tray about the size of a potholder, while also holding onto the kids somehow and worming my way through a thicket of monster truck enthusiasts. Imagine, if you will, trying to climb a rickety ladder while balancing three hardboiled eggs on a popsicle stick with one kid on your back and another one pulling excitedly on your pocket, and you will have the basic idea.

Of course, our seats were on the other side of the arena, and by the time we made our way around the arena and finally reached the ramp leading down to our seats, the cup of French fries, top heavy with the addition of ketchup, took a sudden suicidal leap off the tray onto the floor. Four dollars, shot, just like that.

“I guess we won’t be having fries, huh, Daddy?” Kayden said, surprisingly chipper under the circumstances.

Once we found our seats, I was somewhat startled how close to the action we actually were. Wow, the kids were going to be thrilled with these seats, I thought. The brightly colored monster trucks were arranged in a semi circle on our side of the arena, and the closest truck was no more than 40 or 50 feet away.

We had made it just in time. I had no sooner passed out the food than the announcer took the mike to begin the show. A few seconds later, the drivers appeared to wild cheers from the crowd and assumed their positions behind the wheels of the trucks. The kids were leaning forward in their seats with anticipation.

Suddenly, there was an enormous explosion that rocked the entire arena, pinning the kids back against their seats, transforming their looks of eagerness into expressions of abject terror. The explosion did not subside — it was constant, all enveloping noise, noise more monstrous than the trucks from which it issued. It was merely the sound of the gentlemen starting their engines. Merely. I looked at the kids. Both were weeping.

“Daddy, I’m scared!” Jack said. “Please take me home right now!”

“Please, Daddy, get us OUT of here,” Kayden agreed.

I quickly reviewed the numbers. Fifty bucks for the tickets. Twenty-five bucks for two dollars worth of food. Another twenty for gas. Four hours of driving. Fifteen seconds of “entertainment.”

I tried putting my hands over Jack’s ears, while urging Kayden to cover her own ears. Still, they wept, harder, since it appeared that the ordeal had just begun.

I saw it was no use, and ushered them out of the arena, away from the terrible noise. I was ready to take them out for ice cream, or to go in search of some local park to salvage something from the trip, when an idea occurred to me.

“Hey, guys, what if we go up higher, far away from the trucks where it is not as loud? If you are still scared, we’ll leave in a few minutes, but let’s just try it.”

They were in no way sold on this idea, but they could see that I was determined to give it one more shot, so they played along. So we gave up our expensive, choice seats and headed to the upper level, up, up, and up some more until there were no more seats behind us and we had an entire section more or less to ourselves. From here, the monster trucks were not so intimidating, the noise not quite so earsplitting.

The kids were still uncertain when we settled in, but they stopped crying, and in a few minutes, when I stole a glance to my left, I could see Jack nodding his head in the affirmative, as if in response to some internal question he had asked himself. Yes, I can. Yes. Yes.

“Daddy, look at the one with the ears and the tail!” Kayden shouted with something like enthusiasm. “His name is Monster Mutt! He’s my favorite!”

Two hours later, I had experienced my first Monster Truck Jam. We made it through. By the end of it, I felt like one of the few survivors in the Poseidon Adventure. We had climbed out of the wreckage below to the hull of the ship, and were now waiting for someone to cut us out with a blowtorch.

“Did you have fun, Daddy?” Kayden asked, as we waded among thousands trapped in the flow, slowly oozing like tree sap in the general direction of the exit. I thought of Woody Allen’s comment on reincarnation. “Does it mean I have to sit through the Ice Capades again,” he wondered. There are no more Ice Capades. But there will be other Monster Truck Jams.

Then I looked at my two children, now buzzing with excitement like miniature monster trucks waiting to unleash their own torrents of noise on mom as soon as they got home, stories of enormous trucks crushing things, and motorcycles jumping off ramps, and dune buggies racing around the track!

“Fun?” I said. “You bet I did. One of the best times ever.”

I looked at Jack, who was nodding again. Yes. Yes. Yes.

I didn’t need to review the numbers again. This time, it all added up.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Of course I had HEARD of Facebook. I may be well into the marrow of middle age by now, but I am not completely out of touch with all things modern. I teach in a college, and I’m around young adults every day. If I don’t quiz them about what’s new and hip (which would not include the word “hip,” for example), I do absorb some things by osmosis. I have an iPod for instance, which is easier than carrying around a Walkman, which was easier than carrying around a boombox. As long as the latest technology makes life easier and I can still listen to Neil Young and the Stones on it, I’m all for it.

Still, I saw no reason to get myself a Facebook page, until I caught up briefly with a long lost relative of whom I have always been quite fond, and she suggested that it would be a good way for us to stay in touch, even share photos of the kids and such. I would be able to read her “profile” and see what movies, music, and television shows she was into these days, which is something I have always taken a perverse interest in doing with people I meet, as if the ownership of six John Cougar Mellencamp albums could tell you all you need to know about someone. I know a guy who won’t date a woman unless she likes John Prine, so maybe there is something to it.

I discovered that it is fairly easy to set up a basic Facebook page, especially if you don’t take the time to upload photographs or go into much depth in filling out the profile information. Within minutes, I had myself a profile that can best be described as “rudimentary,” and within an hour, I had my first Facebook friend (my cousin). We exchanged a couple of messages, and I was able to read her profile and see pictures of her, the family, friends, pets, and so forth. Although she suggested that I at least put up a photograph and add a little bit of information to my profile, I really had no intentions of doing anything else with my Facebook page. I had accomplished my mission of catching up with my cousin and establishing a pathway for future contact, and that was all I wanted or expected.

Then a strange and wonderful thing happened. I got a message from Robin. Now, as it happens, my wife and I had just been at my mom’s house a few weeks back, and mom had found some old keepsakes of mine in the attic, including a folder with several essays written by a bunch of fifth-graders. The essays were about me, because I was “Student Of The Week” that particular week in October of 1972. Not only was there an essay written by Robin, there were several others that mentioned Robin. Evidently, we were something of an item, at least so far as I could decode the murky symbolism of grade school romance.

Now, 37 years later, Robin lives in Pittsburgh and her children are grown. Before we had exchanged two messages, I had messages from four or five other classmates, none of whom I had seen or heard from in years, even decades. By the end of the week, we were having a cyber class reunion, with messages flying in all directions.

Finally, just last week, I got a message from a fellow named Thomas. He wanted to know if I was the same guy that taught English at Appalachian State in 1988. I recognized his name right away. He had been one of my favorite students, the type of student who is a class clown, but is secretly very smart and serious about school, so long as you don’t blow his cover. Because I ended up getting another job and moving away a couple of years after I taught his class, I didn’t know that he went on to graduate from ASU with a major in English. He now lives in Concord with his wife and two children, and he has become an endurance athlete. He says he is coming to Asheville on business sometime this spring, and we are going to find some time to meet for lunch while he is here.

One of my former classmates, Jerry, is up to 660 Facebook friends. My 15 pales in comparison, but I am so inspired by my collection of new/old friends, that I finally did put up a photo — of my son — and a video of both my kids singing “Yellow Submarine,” which is getting good reviews so far.

Maybe I will put up a few more photos, or post an inspirational quote or two. I obviously need to spruce the place up a bit, since you never know who might drop in for a visit.

(Chris Cox is a teacher and writer who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Irene is not just a good student. She is one of the very best at her school, near the top of her class and hard working as they come. Under ordinary circumstances, she would be filling out applications to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke, Wake Forest, and other top universities. She would be competing for prestigious scholarships.

She would be visiting these campuses and talking over her options with academic counselors, comparing programs and getting a feel for what her life might be like in these different settings. It would be one of the most exciting times of her life. Having put herself in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose among excellent universities as a result of her extraordinary work and commitment to her education and future, she would have the whole world at her doorstep.

There is never again a time in person’s life quite like being 17 or 18 years old, especially for someone like Irene, a student with the potential and drive to do or be almost anything she wants to be. If the election of Barack Obama meant anything, it meant that the American Dream really does exist.

Unlike our most recent president, Obama was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, did not have every break and advantage handed to him along the way. He came from a very poor background, but he worked hard, never letting the challenges of his childhood or the negative stereotypes about his ethnic heritage prevent him from accomplishing his goals as a student. Not only did he attend Harvard Law School, he was the first black student to ever become president of the Harvard Law Review. Now he is President of the United States. His story is an affirmation of what is possible if a person is only determined enough to succeed.

All of this stands as an inspiration then, for Irene? Well, no. In fact, it is a pill perhaps even more bitter to swallow. The one thing Irene cannot do, regardless of how hard she works or what she accomplishes in high school, regardless of how highly her teachers think of her or how bejeweled her academic record may be, is to make herself an American citizen. She cannot change the circumstances of her birth, or account for the decisions her parents made.

And what decisions are these, exactly? To come to America to find a better life? To work hard and earn a place of respect in the community? To open a restaurant and feed people? To send their children to a better school?

The issue of illegal immigration has been hotly debated, and people of good will can certainly disagree about it. Unfortunately, the debate has not always been waged by people of good will; we have all seen depressing examples of how quickly bigotry can be introduced into the equation. “Those people” are coming here to take our jobs, spreading their diseases and lowering the quality of life wherever “they” go. Yes, depressing, the ignorance and the hatred that so often goes with it.

Still, the issue remains, and it is a serious issue that must be addressed by serious people, not the louts who typically dominate public discourse with their shrill voices, sharpened to a point by the whetstone of talk radio. That’s all well and good. In the meantime, what I want to know is this: What about Irene?

Irene should be filling out applications to the best universities in the state, but she isn’t. She cannot, because while she has a grade point average that very few students can match, she does not have what even the laziest, least ambitious students all have: a social security number. Without one, she has no realistic shot at getting into any of those schools. The very best she can hope for is to get in, and then have to pay out-of-state tuition, which so far exceeds in-state tuition rates as to make it impossible to even consider, especially since she cannot compete for any scholarships.

Under ordinary circumstances, her achievements in high school would have brought her to the beginning of something bigger, perhaps much bigger. That would be up to her, because in America, as Barack Obama has proven, you can be anything if you work hard enough and believe strongly enough in yourself and your future.

But these circumstances are not ordinary, even if they are not unique. Irene may not be the only child of illegal immigrants to excel in high school, and not the only one with the potential to achieve wondrous things at our finest universities. And yet, there she is, at the door, which, for her, is locked.

Whether we agree or disagree about illegal immigration, there are fundamental questions that go much deeper than the issue itself, especially in the abstract. If an illegal immigrant appears at the hospital so badly in need of treatment that death is a real possibility, would we choose to ignore it and let him die? If a student does everything in her power to achieve the American dream, are we going to deny her the chance that any of our sons and daughters would have? Remember, even if you have little sympathy for what her parents chose to do, Irene did not make that choice.

Adversity teaches us things about ourselves, sometimes things we might just as soon not learn. In these bad economic times, when so many are suffering, it is all the more likely that anger toward illegal immigrants will be ginned up. The question is, even in tough times like these, do we really want to live in a country callous enough to say “No, you can’t” to Irene?

President Obama’s mantra before the election was “Yes, we can.” I sincerely hope Irene is part of “we” and not just another one of “those people.”

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

“Unique” is a word much abused as a descriptor for human beings. I have heard many, many people described as unique, people who are actually a great deal more like other people than they would like us to believe. Scratch the surface of a gothic kid and underneath you’ll find someone who is most likely just as desperate to find his place and fit in as any fraternity boy. This is not a criticism — just an observation of how seldom we meet a truly unique individual, someone for whom being different is not a style, but a calling.

My friend, Terry Presnell, was a unique person. I thought he might be a poser, or simply an advanced prankster, back in high school when we were on the tennis team, and he wore a rubber Richard Nixon Halloween mask in a match against West Wilkes, our conference rival, and refused to take it off, despite the protest of his opponent and the other coach. Nothing in the rules against wearing a mask to play tennis, Terry said. He wore it, and won the match.

Terry wasn’t big on rules anyway. Rules came from institutions, as far as he was concerned, and he had great, venomous contempt for institutions — schools, churches, government, you name it. Like Huck Finn, he was afraid that institutions were out to “civilize” him, and when he looked around, he didn’t much care for what civilization had come to mean in this age — war, hypocrisy, tyranny, fighting over oil but not genocide. He didn’t want any part of that “civilization.”

For Terry, the continental United States was his Mississippi River, and he drifted all across this country, never allowing himself to become too “tied down” to any particular job. Over the years, he called me from all sorts of places — Las Vegas, Kitty Hawk, somewhere in New Mexico, the Keys in Florida. He kept as much as possible to warmer climates, with the beach as a special favorite. He took any sort of job he could find, even delivering newspapers if necessary. He basked in the sun, but he really thrived in the nightlife. Within a few days, he became a “personality” in any town he lived in, which was as natural to him as breathing, with his background in professional wrestling, radio, and gonzo journalism. He had been a columnist for several newspapers, even started his own rag in the Ozarks, which lasted for a good while until he got behind on some debts and then pulled a stunt that would prove to be the beginning of the end for him.

Terry owed some company $1,400, which may not seem like an insurmountable sum unless you don’t have it and can’t get it. He could have called his friends — we would have pitched in and got him out of a jam. But he had never taken charity from any of us, and wasn’t going to start then. So he thought of a way out. He drew up a fake death certificate, sent it to the company, and hit the road with everything he could take with him, leaving whatever was left behind.

This bad decision — which I can easily imagine Terry rationalizing as a silly prank that he would somehow make good on later — led to other bad decisions. I believe there were some counterfeit checks, identity theft, I can’t remember what all. He stayed on the run for months, but one night in Ohio he got pulled over on a routine traffic stop, and within minutes, it was all over. In some ways, it was a relief to Terry. As the bad decisions accumulated, there was just no way to keep going without making another one, to get him through the next day.

He went to prison for a few years, and we lost touch. Then, a little over a year ago, he reappeared in our hometown, about twice his normal weight, barely able to move. Prison had been hard on him. He had a variety of very serious health problems, and no real way to make a living. Some of us did what we could for him, donating furniture, a microwave, a computer, groceries, whatever he needed to get on his feet. But he couldn’t get on his feet, not in any meaningful way. Part of being Terry was being on the move, beholden to no man and no institution.

He got by in a dingy little rent-controlled apartment for about a year. I saw him whenever I got home, which was only a couple of times. We visited and reminisced and laughed a lot — he had the greatest laugh in the world. He laughed with his whole body, his shoulders literally shaking up and down if he was really amused.

The last time I saw him, right around Thanksgiving, he gave me a grocery bag packed full of movies and CDs. He said he was getting the hell out of Sparta and moving back to Hickory, a town where he probably had the most success in making a decent living and where he had become pretty well known for his column on pop culture.

Now we know the real story. He “moved” to Hickory as a launching pad for his last big adventure, a trip to Florida, where he spent the last days of his life driving around, sleeping in the car most likely, or on the beach, drinking beer, which he had not really been able to do much with his health in such poor shape. He wrote a few fond farewells to his friends, and assembled packages for a couple of people containing the most meaningful scraps of his life. Somehow, he managed to get a gun, which he used to shoot himself two weeks ago.

Another friend from the old days, Stewart, called me last week to tell me about it. Initially, there were no reports of a note, which didn’t sound like Terry. Sure enough, two days later, Stewart called me again and said he had received a package, along with a note, in which Terry basically said that with his health getting poorer by the day, he was looking at another lengthy hospital stay, dialysis, even worse. He quoted Neil Young, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” He said if the preachers were right, he was “probably headed South,” but he thought the company would be more interesting there anyway. He said if reincarnation turned out to be true, he might come back as a fat Chihuahua.

He said that if there was going to be a service, he wanted only for a few of his friends to get together, drink a few beers, listen to some music from the old days, and remember some of the good times. He said he absolutely did not want the service to be held in a church, or for there to be any preachers.

There was a service on Saturday, at Saddle Mountain Baptist Church in Ennice, N.C. There were preachers. One of them had talked with him a handful of times in the hospital, the other had never met him at all. I was asked to speak, too, so I got up and shared a few stories, but whatever I said was swallowed up whole by 45 minutes of pure alter call preaching. For these two fellows, Terry was not a person. He was a platform. His life had no meaning for them other than as a cautionary tale for the rest of us. At one point, the preacher said, “Since I didn’t know Terry, I asked God what to say here today, and God said, “Remember me,’” which, it turns out, is translated as a very long story about the preacher’s own salvation, and how, thank God, he had not made the choices Terry had made.

It turns out that most of the memorial service for Terry was not really for Terry after all. Several times, I thought about walking out. I wish I had. After the service, someone told me they wished I had had an opportunity for a rebuttal.

Well, here it is. I don’t presume to know where Terry is today, but if God has a sense of humor, Terry may be pleasantly surprised with his accommodations. On the other hand, those responsible for denying him his final wishes ought to be deeply ashamed. Like Huck Finn, Terry once faked his own death. Unlike Huck Finn, he did not get to watch his own funeral. If he had, he would have been outraged. I have known him for 35 years, and I can guarantee that much. He would not have been alone. I spoke with at least a dozen of his friends after the service in front of the church, and every single one of them was upset by the service. Someone said it was more like a revival than a memorial for Terry. Someone else said those preachers ought to be ashamed.

Sometime this spring, there will be another service, the one he asked for. Call it a memorial mulligan, a do over. We’re going to get together, play some of the old songs, and drink a few beers in his honor. Then we are going to divide up his ashes and take them to various beaches — wherever anyone is going on vacation this summer — and set him loose on the tide.

If I see a fat Chihuahua running loose on the shore, I swear I’ll bring it home.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

March Madness is upon us, and if you or anyone in your house has ever played basketball or perhaps even seen a basketball, chances are that you spent a long weekend feasting on the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament. As you know, as a resident of North Carolina, you are required by law to watch any game with an ACC school in it. North Carolina is to basketball what Italy is to spaghetti. Other states may brag about their Nobel Prize winners or what have you — we have Michael Jordan. I said we have Michael Jordan. That’s Air Jordan, or Mr. Jordan, if you don’t come from North Carolina. So, Mr. Nobel Prize winner and the state you came from, you still want some? Didn’t think so.

College basketball is a religion here, of course, and March Madness is our 18 days of Christmas. There are those who have complete faith that God favors the Tar Heels — why is the sky blue, as the bumper sticker saith. Others insist that the Duke Blue Devils are the Chosen People, pointing to the arrival of Coach Mike Krzyzewski as proof of divine intervention or Manifest Destiny or whatever.

At one time, in 1983 to be exact, it seemed all but certain that a higher power was manipulating free throw shots specifically in order to help the North Carolina State Wolfpack complete the most improbable run in college basketball history. The “Cardiac Pack” won the championship by coming from behind again and again throughout the tournament, before finally slaying Goliath — the University of Houston Cougars, and their two future NBA Hall of Famers Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler — in the championship game. It was like Opie Taylor knocking out Mike Tyson.

Ironically, the point guard for the Cardiac Pack in 1983 was Sidney Lowe, who is the current head coach of N.C. State, a team that seems to have lost its way from the basketball promised land. This season, not only did the Wolfpack not make the NCAA tournament, it did not even get an invitation to the National Invitational Tournament, or the NIT. Now, the NIT once was a prestigious tournament back in the day when only the conference champion got a bid to the NCAA tournament. But with the field for the big tournament now expanded to 65 teams, failing to get into the big dance and having to settle for the NIT is roughly as exciting as taking your cousin to the prom.

And, failing even to get into the NIT, well, maybe this is the Biblical equivalent of the Wolfpack spending 40 years in the desert, “a great and terrible wilderness.” Can Sidney lead the Pack back to the Promised Land? Who knows? It doesn’t look promising.

I went to N.C. State myself. In fact, I went to school with Lowe, Derrick Whittenberg, Thurl Bailey, and the rest of that magical 1983 team. And though I had dropped out of college the semester before they won the national championship, I was in Raleigh with my friends the night the Pack beat Houston. To this day, it is my one transcendent moment in sports, greater than my hole in one at Lake Junaluska, greater than winning the first (and only) annual Alleghany Open putt putt tournament in 1981, greater than all my bowling trophies combined.

Lorenzo Charles grabbed and dunked the ball after a desperate last second shot by Derrick Whittenberg, and I spent the next several hours in ecstasy that felt like I imagine heaven feeling. Pure joy, shared by thousands all at once.

As I filled out my brackets last week, I remembered 1983, of course. Twenty-six years ago, I was witness to a miracle. Now, I just hope to win 20 bucks in the office pool. I completed my selections without much enthusiasm, fished out a dollar, and turned it in to the bracketmaster. Well, that was that.

Then, Thursday arrived, the first games tipped off, and I felt it all come back. Not just 1983, but 1973 (or 1976 or 1979 or...) when kids used to get out of school early to go home and watch the opening round of the ACC tournament. This being North Carolina, the first round of the tournament was an unofficial holiday. Everyone went home, including the teachers, to watch the games.

Before I knew it, I was home in front of the set, just like the old days. I’ll leave it to others to fight the holy war between Duke and Carolina. I’ll just enjoy the games and savor the memories. I plan on winning that 20 dollars, too. Manifest Destiny or whatever.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

I love dogs. Except during that period in my life when I lived in a seemingly endless series of shoebox apartments that did not allow pets larger or furrier than goldfish, I have always had at least one dog, and usually two. I have seen a good many dogs come and go in my life, but I have never, ever actually bought a dog. With so many dogs in shelters, it is simply against my principles. All of my dogs have been either shelter dogs or strays I found out roaming around.

But I’ll tell you something I’ve learned: There are principles, and then there is marriage. If you are not married, then you may not know this — I didn’t — but marriage has its own principles that may not always snuggle up cozily to your own. If you do not grasp this basic truth, you will one day wind up in the doghouse with your shelter dog and your precious principles for company.

Now my wife is not an acquisitive person and not really an animal person either — let’s just say she is more tolerant of our pets than doting and leave it be — but for years, she has fancied dachshunds, especially miniature dachshunds. If we are driving down the street and she sees one in a neighbor’s yard or on a leash, she falls into paroxysms of pure schoolgirl joy, the way schoolgirls used to get over catching an unexpected glimpse at David Cassidy in Tiger Beat. If my wife were still a schoolgirl, I guess she would go crazy over the Jonas Brothers, but since she is married with kids, a job, a mortgage, and a minivan with a window that will roll down but not back up, her passions have shifted. Teen idols are out, miniature dachshunds are in.

So I did the right thing and got her a miniature dachshund calendar for Christmas. I thought it was the perfect compromise for someone who loved the breed, but already had one dog, one cat, two gerbils, two children, and one husband on her hands. She could look at dachshunds every day of the week, every month of the year, and never have to feed one, clean up after it, take it to the vet, or complain that it had been gnawing on her best work shoes. She would have her daily quota of dachshund cuteness, without any poop or barking. Pretty good deal, I thought.

But there are the things you think, and then there is marriage, and these things do not always sit comfortably together in the same carriage on the Ferris Wheel. In other words, she did like the calendar — it hangs in our kitchen now, where every single day one of 12 adorable dachshund puppies will supervise one of us making breakfast or washing the dishes until the year is up. If I thought this would cure her puppy fever, however, it didn’t take long to see that it had just the opposite effect. With a cute dachshund staring her in the face every day — Mr. February was especially adorable, I must admit — my wife suddenly could no longer contain herself.

All I’ve heard for two solid months is “dachshund this” and “dachshund that.” She manages to work dachshunds into every conversation, regardless of how ill fitting it may seem to anyone not quite so dachshund-centric. Yes, it is true that we may be able to get another 50,000 miles out of the minivan, but how many miles would we get out of a brand new miniature dachshund puppy? Sure, she has seen the brochures that came from Florida, and maybe we should go there for vacation this summer, but have I imagined how great it would be to see a dachshund puppy encountering the ocean for the first time?

After several weeks of this, I knew what had to be done, so on Monday, we just did it. We found an adorable miniature dachshund puppy for sale online, and made arrangements to meet the owners in Asheville to “look him over.”

“We can just look,” my wife said. “We don’t have to buy him.”

Well, there are the things you don’t have to do, and then there is marriage. Needless to say, these things don’t always drink out of the same water dish. I grabbed the checkbook and we were off.

We met the owners at Alan’s Pawn and Jewelry, and within two minutes after we pulled into the parking lot, my wife had the puppy in her hands. He was six weeks old, the runt of the litter. He was unbelievably tiny, a cigarette lighter with short legs and floppy ears, a Pez dispenser with puppy breath and needle teeth.

He also looked exactly like Mr. February.

You know how this story ends. It ends with a new puppy in your house, chewing on anything he can get his tiny mouth around. It ends with you out in the yard at 4 a.m., watching a shivering puppy do his business in the yard with the moon as the only witness. It ends with your children excited, even delirious, over the arrival of the new “mincer dot son,” as your son calls him.

It ends with your wife doting on the puppy, smiling and happy. When she’s not doting on him, she’s doting on YOU. And why shouldn’t she? You’re a genius. It only took you about three years to figure this out. You congratulate yourself and think about grabbing a quick nap.

You’d better hurry, before Mr. February wakes up from his.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

I don’t really know when nightmares begin. I guess it is possible that babies have nightmares, shaken awake in the night by dreams of stuffed giraffes turned suddenly sinister or a nipple that you chase and chase and never quite catch up to. I remember some pained expressions on my children’s sleeping faces, but we always assumed it was gas, not nightmares.

One thing I do know is that by the time they reach the age of 4, children have nightmares — vivid, terrifying , wrenching nightmares. The kind of nightmares that shatter sleep like an errant baseball shatters a living room window. The kind of nightmares that do not evaporate on contact once they are awake, burned away by the daylight like so much early morning fog, completely forgotten before the Cheerios begin dividing like cells in the cereal bowl.

No, these nightmares linger for hours, even days, making the prospect of going to bed not only a bummer, but a source of pure and profound dread, worse, even, than eating a brussel sprout, nearly as bad as getting a vaccination shot or being hugged too tightly and too long by a well meaning relative. Dreams ... the polyester pressing hard against your face, maybe a sharp pendant scratching you, and the smells ... sweet perfume like rotting peaches, some kind of powder, too.

But dreams lately are even worse than that, a lot worse, worse than anything. You get a shot, the shot’s over. You eat a brussel sprout, you wash it down with a shot of chocolate milk and a jelly bean you smuggled in your pocket. Your great-great-whatever hugs you, you hold your breath and wait for it to pass. These are horrors, but predictable, manageable horrors. What to do about these dreams? There is no way to predict them, no way to manage them.

Worse, your mind reels and reels and reels as darkness falls, and the machinery of your nighttime ritual pushes you toward bedtime. The taking of baths, the brushing of teeth, the reading of stories, the singing of the familiar bedtime songs, the old repetition of kisses and goodnights, more kisses and more goodnights, a couple of last minute random questions designed for last-ditch stalling — yes, we may have ice cream tomorrow, no, we can’t go to the beach yet — one last good night. OK, one more.

Now it comes. Images. Sounds. Sensations. What was that? Did you see something just then, right there? You remember something you saw in a book, a monster with terrible yellow teeth. You remember the big bad wolf, the poor pigs. You remember something your friend said, something very scary about enemies and bad guys, and even though you are not exactly sure what an “enemy” is, it can’t be good, not if they’re BAD guys. You hear something outside. The dog barks. Enemies!!!

Time to go get Dad.

I know these dreams are fueled in part by popular culture. As a kid, I thought nothing of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Aunt Rhody and her dead old gray goose, or any other of the time-honored twisted tales that parents inflict on their children, but as a parent, I look at the rich history of flat-out weirdness in children’s literature with some mixture of fascination and disgust. No wonder we’re so violent, so warped, so in need of therapy and self help books. Maybe I was more affected than I realize. I do remember tossing and turning in my bed at night, imagining always what might be outside, lurking, looking for a way to get inside. Isn’t that a persistent theme in children’s stories, after all, something out there trying to get in here?

I remember getting a CD of famous children’s songs from a family friend a couple of years ago when we were getting ready to go to the beach and spend six or seven hours in the minivan with the kids. “This will help entertain them,” the friend said. Sure enough, they listened attentively for a good while, and my mind began to wander aimlessly and quite pleasantly until the lyrics of a creepy little song about lady bugs crept into my consciousness: “Lady bug, Lady bug, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children are gone.”

And we wonder where the nightmares come from? We started skipping the “Lady Bug” song, opting instead to send the bear over the mountain about 1,200 times before we got to Charleston.

Taking the advice of another friend, I have begun using Monster Spray every night before bed — yes, it is now part of the bedtime ritual. I spray around the doors and windows, under the beds, over the beds, even give a good blast into the center of the room for good measure. According to the label, it also works well on enemies and bad guys.

Now, good night, guys. I love you, too. Yes, we can throw the Frisbee tomorrow. Good night ... what’s that? No, we aren’t having brussel sprouts tomorrow.

Sweet dreams, buddy. Yes, the spray lasts all night. Yes, really.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

It seems impossible that my niece is going to have a baby. She is 20 years old, which is about the same age as my favorite pair of Levis. I remember when she was born. We all crowded around the crib and agreed that she looked exactly like my sister, which she did. The next thing I knew she was waving a magic wand in a dance recital, and not long after that she was getting her driver’s license and writing tragic poems about teenage angst in her high school English class.

Now she’s having a baby, a girl she’s naming Betty that is due to arrive in about a week, give or take, and I have just this one question, addressed to no one in particular: Where did 20 years go? Why is the distance between the ages of 7 and 27 so very, very much longer than the distance between 27 and 47?

•••

In keeping with the age, I have been following progress reports on her pregnancy — and the various moods that go with it — on her MySpace page. We have chimed in from time to time with chipper comments on her message board, where her friends congregate daily to see what is new. They offer help if she needs any, worry if she doesn’t answer the phone promptly, and gush over newly posted pictures of her belly, pushing out and filling her brightly colored cotton shirt so fully that it looks like some exotic new planet.

Oh, it will be a new world, all right. The world she has inhabited is about to go away for good, replaced by a completely foreign world in which she must learn the language, laws, and customs while trying to survive in it at the same time. One minute she seems to know this, the next she seems completely unaware of just how profound this change is going to be.

On the other hand, how could she be prepared? How could anyone? How could I? How could you? You can read all the books you can find, watch all the instructional videos, subscribe to all the magazines, write down every syllable of advice that experienced mothers give you, and still be utterly bewildered the first time your newborn gets a sudden fever, or can’t get to sleep no matter what you try.

You’ve done everything you are supposed to do, everything right by the book, everything you were told, and yet there you are, at 3 a.m., driving the back roads listening to the Eagles’ greatest hits, just hoping your baby will finally go to sleep in her car seat.

Nope, it’s not another tequila sunrise, but that won’t make it any easier in three hours when she wakes you up again, just as you are finally getting some desperately needed sleep. Welcome to the Hotel California. ‘You can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.’

•••

Although my brother is younger than I am, he and his wife had kids before we did, so he gave me some free advice to help me prepare at least in some measure for what was coming.

“It is overwhelming in every way,” he said. “Sometimes it’s overwhelming in a great way, and sometimes it’s overwhelming in a not so great way.”

I don’t know if that really qualifies as advice, but it is a fundamental truth about becoming a parent that any new parent needs to recognize and, if possible, embrace. It is learning to live in constant fear that you are doing something profoundly, irrevocably wrong, and that even if you don’t do anything wrong, terrible things can still happen at any time. It is learning the real meaning of patience, and balance, and resolve. These are just words among other words until you have a new baby in your home, when they suddenly and forcefully take on a much more profound meaning than you could have ever realized. You only thought of yourself as a patient, balanced, and resolute person. You were nothing of the sort. Now you’ll learn. You’d better.

You will also learn the meaning of love the first time you see and hold your baby, the first time the baby holds your finger, the first time she smiles. You are going to have a year of firsts — everything will be marked, noted, photographed. It really is a new planet after all, and you are discovering all of its countries day by day, recording every one.

It is overwhelming in every way.

•••

So my niece is having a baby. I guess I should write something else on her MySpace page, while she still has time to look at it. I should tell her that this is it, the adventure of a lifetime. I should tell her to savor every minute of it, even the tougher moments. She is not going to believe how quickly 20 years can go by. Also, no matter how many diapers she got at her baby shower, she is going to need more. Lots more. Bon voyage!

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)